Google published an update to the site reputation policy on Friday 28 August, and the part that matters takes effect on 30 August. From that date a manual action under this policy does something different depending on where the person searching is sitting.
This is the policy people still call parasite SEO. It covers third-party content published on a host site mainly because of the ranking signals that host already earned from its own content. Coupon sections on newspaper domains, casino reviews on university subdomains, that shape.
What actually changes on 30 August
Two behaviours, one policy, split by region. Google’s wording:
- For users outside the EEA, a manual action affects search results for the portion of the site affected. The rest of the site is not affected, which is how it already worked.
- For users inside the EEA, the impact of the manual action does not apply. Google says the affected section “may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site”.
Read the second one twice, because it is not an exemption. Inside the EEA the section is not demoted, it is cut loose. It stops inheriting the host domain’s signals and has to stand on whatever it earned itself. For a coupon directory bolted onto a national newspaper, being made to rank on its own merits and being demoted are not far apart in practice. The mechanism is different, the destination often is not.
Google is explicit about why the split exists: discussion with the European Commission, and its own stated concern that an overbroad reading of the DMA would stop it acting on manipulation. That is context, not something you can act on.
What Google says it looks at
The blog post says Google is also clarifying the criteria behind the policy, and the spam policies page now carries that detail. This is the more useful half of the announcement and it is getting almost none of the attention.
The stated goal of a human review is to decide whether the content on that part of the site was created with enough input, editorial oversight or contribution from the host site to count as fully integrated with it. Four objective factors are named:
- How the content is presented. Do the design, formatting, typography and UX match the host domain?
- The quality of the content, measured against the standard of the main domain.
- Stated or implied authorship. Is ownership or responsibility acknowledged, and does anything contradict it?
- Whether the same content appears elsewhere in identical or near-identical form.
Google adds that none of the four is necessary or sufficient on its own. That caveat is doing real work. There is no threshold here, no score, nothing you can pass by fixing three of four. It is a judgement call by a reviewer, described honestly as a judgement call.
Who should care, and who should not
Almost nobody reading this has a site reputation problem. The policy is aimed at established domains renting out their authority, and if you are not hosting third-party sections you can stop here.
If you are, the four factors are the closest thing to a checklist Google has published, and three of them are checkable in an afternoon. Open a page from the hosted section and one from the main site side by side. A different header, different type, no named author, and copy that turns up on four other domains is exactly the profile the policy describes. Whether the section reads as part of the site or as a tenant in it is a structural question, and no amount of on-page work answers it.
The EEA split adds a wrinkle for anyone with traffic on both sides of that line, because from 30 August the same URL can behave differently for a reader in Dublin and a reader in Toronto. If a European market holds while every other market falls on the same section, that pattern now has a policy explanation rather than a technical one.
What I am checking
I opened the Manual actions report on every property I have access to, which is what I do first whenever a policy changes, and there is nothing in any of them. That is the expected result and it is still worth thirty seconds. A manual action is the one Search Console signal that is never ambiguous: the report either has an entry or it does not, and unlike a ranking drop there is nothing to interpret. It is the same reason I open that report before anything else when a client reports a fall during an update, which I set out in what to do during a Google update.
Worth being clear about what this is not. It is not an algorithm update and it has nothing to do with the August 2026 spam update, which finished rolling out on 21 August. Nothing here moves rankings on its own. It changes what happens after a human reviewer has already decided something, which is a far smaller group of sites than the noise around the announcement suggests.
One thing I cannot tell you yet: what “ranks independently” looks like in practice inside the EEA. Google has not described the mechanism beyond that one sentence, and no site has been through it under the new rules, because the rules start tomorrow. Anyone explaining the effect in detail today is guessing, and I would treat a confident answer this week as a reason to trust the source less.
Sources
- Google Search Central Blog, Update to the Site Reputation Policy, 28 August 2026, for the 30 August date and the EEA split
- Google Search Central, spam policies for Google web search, site reputation policy section, for the definition, the examples and the four review factors, checked 29 August 2026
- Google Search Console Help, manual actions and reconsideration requests, for notification and appeal
- Google Search Status Dashboard, Ranking incident history, for the August 2026 spam update rollout window, checked 29 August 2026